[MPQ] MPQ Based Navigation Project

[dejavu11]

As many know (or may not know) all of the terrain and building data for WOW is actually kept client-side. As such if one spent the time to read it and put it all together, they could create a navigation mesh for the entire WOW world from that data. I've started just such a project and gotten pretty far.

I've been blogging step by step what I've done over at MPQNav Public Blog | WOW Navigation from MPQ Files and I thought some people might enjoy reading it. Source code is available after each step at the end of each post.

Hopefully this isn't against any rules (I double-checked and this seemed like the best place to put this) and it is a work in progress but pretty far along.

Enjoy!

[maclone]

Give us a proof that you made it.
For example add a note on "your" blog which says mmowned.com.

[dejavu11]

Give us a proof that you made it.
For example add a note on "your" blog which says mmowned.com.

Fair enough New post up just for you.

[maclone]

Fair enough New post up just for you.

Ok... then...
That's awesome! +rep (Karma lol)

[MooseBoi]

EDIT-OH DAMN NICE JOB +rep

[Simey]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the same as WoW map viewer?
Anyways - looks cool
+Rep

[Jadedknight]

So forgive me (newb). What will this lead to?

[dejavu11]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the same as WoW map viewer?
Anyways - looks cool
+Rep

Similar in a few ways (mainly the rendering idea) but different in many more.

On this project the rendering is only there as a visual debugging as the project is built (if your buildings are upside down it's a lot easier to see it then it would be to "read" it in the massive amount of vertices).

Eventually the visual portion of it will be completely removed (or rather it will be disabled with a toggle).

So forgive me (newb). What will this lead to?

The idea in the end is a large collection of points in the WOW world and connections between them.

Think of every place you can stand in WOW as a point in 3D space. Now if you can walk from one point to one next to it (there's not a fence in the way for example) then there will be a "connection" between those two points.

Once you have that large collection of data for the entire wow world, a simple pathfinder (such as the A* algorithm) can quickly parse out paths from anywhere to anywhere.

So for example your bot is in Stormwind, and it wants to go down and grind in STV. The end goal is for this program to give your bot a list of waypoints to follow to get their (eventually with weighting to go by roads if possible, avoid water, etc..).

[Vex.]

someone compile a bot to run with this please

[dejavu11]

someone compile a bot to run with this please

You wouldn't get very far with that at the moment, it's still a work in progress. Right now as far as it goes is decent amount of points generated based only on bounding boxes. Still need to work out all the finer collision tests before any usable mesh could be generated.

[Jadedknight]

Oh snap! This is amazing!

[jjaa]

wow, it looks really awesome!

[dejavu11]

Thanks guys

[undrgrnd59]

Thats preety damned cool. I'll keep up to date with this hoping that someday I can use it for my own bots +Rep

[Apoc]

Haha, nice to see you posting this on here Dejavu.

Hope to see this finished soon bro. Love to see stuff working better than the current nav systems available. (Without the high pricetags )